Service providers are finding it increasingly cost effective to consolidate voice and video applications into a single packet based network. The success of this consolidation hinges on the ability to provide the requisite Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to individual applications in place of networks that have traditionally been used to carry such types of traffic. For real time applications, this translates into strict bandwidth, end to end delay, jitter and loss rate guarantees. For example, applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing require the largest possible bandwidth while keeping the end to end delay, jitter, and packet loss rates at a minimum. Lower end to end delay results in a more satisfactory, natural-feeling conferencing experience; conversely, large delay values result in unnatural conversations with long pauses between phrases or sentences. Large jitter values (delay variability) may result in jerky video or stuttering, popping audio. It may also result in packet getting dropped for exceeding its delay budget. Packet losses exceeding the tolerable limit further results in poor voice and video quality due to clipping and skipping. In today's “best effort” data networks, the router and switch buffers tend to fill up rapidly resulting in delays and packet losses. In addition to these delays, delay jitter and loss probability values for the packets accumulate with each hop traversed in the network.
In a differentiated services framework, these effects are mitigated by marking packets belonging to real-time sessions to receive preferential forwarding treatment, or per-hop behavior, at each network node. However, even when some kind of priority queuing and scheduling (e.g. as in Diffserv) is used for real time traffic, QoS requirements are dependent on key parameters. Such parameters include the number of network hops on which such traffic is routed. It is known that, even when priority queuing is used for voice traffic, the queuing delays can become significantly large even for 5-hop length paths, due to transmission delays of non-voice packets on small bandwidth links (sub-10 Mbps links).
Minimizing the number of hops of the paths used for routing data traffic is important in other contexts, such as minimizing signal quality deterioration in optical networks. As signals travel over multiple hops they become weaker and may need to be regenerated if the number of hops become too large. This may entail costly Optical-Electrical-Optical (OEO) converts. Additionally, in MPLS and optical networks, fast restoration can be achieved by locally routing around failures using pre-setup detour paths. For example the MPLS fast restoration mechanism, referred to as fast or local reroute supports a local repair capability. Upon a node or link failure, the first node upstream from the failure reroutes the effected Label Switch Paths (LSP) onto bypass (backup) tunnels, with equivalent guaranteed bandwidths, to bypass the failure point. The number of hops in the new path for the LSP is thus directly related to the length of original path and the length of the bypass tunnels for the failed links or nodes. The number of hops in the rerouted path can easily become large for poorly designed networks. Thus effective restoration schemes are needed that not only guarantee quick restoration from failures but also guarantee that there is no significant increase in the hop counts of the rerouted paths.